My mom and I love Anna Quindlen and have for years, along with Anne Lamott and a tiny canon of other women writers. Quindlen’s life story is fascinating: She is a phenom from way, way back who has matured into a humane, sophisticated commentator on her life at the tail end of the Baby Boom. She wrote One True Thing, which was Cannonball #5.

I found Object Lessons at a recent charity booksale and snatched it up. It is Quindlen’s first novel and bears some resemblance to her real life. Maggie Scanlan is twelve, making up for her flat, skinny preteen frame with fully teenaged inner turmoil; she is the granddaughter of a proud Irish paterfamilias whose son went emotionally prodigal by marrying an Italian girl. The older girls among her family and friends represent alternate paths Maggie’s life could take, with Maggie’s own mother showing her the option she finds least palatable at the novel’s beginning. As Maggie remains quiet on the sidelines, she realizes her life as a silent observer will limit her life as a potent and gifted doer.

This book is packed with great female characters, but it also contains a great deal of strong, realistic maleness in various forms: Maggie’s grandfathers couldn’t be more different, but each is fascinating; her father is meek, passive, pulled along by his father until his Italian wife acts as ace in the hole. The story’s setting is also an active character: 1960s Bronx and Westchester County, where emerging housing developments threaten the Scanlans’ combination of city wealth and bucolic homesteading.

In the meantime, the girls and women in her life fall by the wayside completely or come into focus, shifting Maggie’s center of balance until she must shut her eyes and reboot. I felt that Maggie was a bit precocious, but her trajectory here felt very earnest. She and her mother are contrasted against one another as they inwardly admit and take ownership of their more small, shameful impulses, and they alone are able to see one another’s feelings or transgressions. When they choose to protect one another, it’s clear they’ll forge ahead together with bittersweet, loving honesty and knowledge.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

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